Curriculum or Not, Teachers Teach Values

By KIMBERLY J. McLARIN,

Published: February 1, 1995

WOODSTOWN, N.J.—
As always, Nina Fue starts the day by checking parental signatures. Anyone who forgot to show his homework to Mom or Dad risks a sweetly stern reminder and a little black mark in Mrs. Fue's book.

"I bet you didn't forget to eat dinner last night," Mrs. Fue tells a sheepish Korey Sickler. "Well, this should be like that. Happens all the time."

Since it's Monday, Mrs. Fue, the 1990 New Jersey teacher of the year, chooses her student of the week. Then, as every day, she asks how her fourth-graders are feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. Jillian has an earache. Stephanie feels badly but does not want to say why. ("That's O.K. Some things are private.")

In 30 short minutes, before the academic day has even begun, Nina Fue teaches responsibility, perseverance and the art of compassion, and she does so without mentioning, or even giving much thought to one of the hot educational topics of the moment -- a formalized values curriculum.

Yet values are as clearly a part of what Mrs. Fue teaches as geography or English or math. When she mentions growing up and getting a job during a grammar lesson, she teaches the work ethic. When she explains, during reading, how a mountain changed with the help of a bird, she teaches cooperation.

And although she is a religious woman, Mrs. Fue believes the importance of the informal daily teaching of values by classroom teachers is being obscured by another hot topic of the moment, school prayer. Regardless of what happens at the start of the school day -- a moment of silence, a minute of prayer -- it is what happens during the rest of the day that matters, she said.

"I don't feel it makes one whit of difference," Mrs. Fue said. "I don't think two minutes of prayer will make or break anyone's value system. That's not the place to get back what's missing. It's a tempest in a teapot."

Like a score of teachers of the year across the nation interviewed for this story, from conservatives to liberals, Mrs. Fue says the heated, much publicized national debates over values curriculums and school prayer overlook the obvious: that quietly, in their own classrooms, good teachers teach values every day.

"I don't see how I can be value-neutral," Mrs. Fue said. "If you don't stand up for what you believe in, who's going to stand up for it?"

Nancy Talbott, the 1994 state teacher of the year from Hays, Kan., put it this way: "Teachers teach values whether they do it intentionally or not." Daily Lessons In Values

It comes in the dozens of small interactions between teacher and student each day, when disciplining a child for cheating or breaking up a fight on the playground. Teachers instill honesty, compassion, respect, societal values that should not offend anyone, said Jerry Howland of Boston, the 1995 Massachusetts teacher of the year.

"I don't think we should stand up and teach the Ten Commandments," Mr. Howland said. "But things like, cheating is not right, murder is not right, those are easy. Those are things that nobody should argue against."

About one in five public school districts now offers formal programs in moral education, ranging from occasional classes in ethics to more ambitious and overarching programs. And that number is growing, said John Martin, executive director of the Character Education Partnership in Alexandria, Va.

But the 20 teachers of the year interviewed across the country are uneasy about formal values curriculums, saying such programs compartmentalize values and create political problems since they will inevitably draw fire from somewhere.

"We have to be very, very careful when teaching values" formally, said Mary Fortenberry, the 1994 state teacher of the year from Newton, Tex., who described herself as a fundamentalist Christian.

"I jokingly say, it's fine, as long as you're teaching my values."

At age 59, Mrs. Fue looks and acts like the Joan Rivers of Woodstown. She has white-blonde hair, laugh lines around her eyes and a host of no-nonsense opinions she is not afraid to share.

For 24 years, give or take a few years she took off to raise two daughters, she has taught in this South Jersey town of fewer than 4,000 people. With its bright Victorian houses and surrounding fields and orchards, Woodstown still looks and feels like Main Street America. It is the kind of town where Mrs. Fue still offers to visit each of her students at home, and the kind where many parents take her up on it.

But even Woodstown has poverty, fractured families and children who come to school woefully absent a consistent parental guidance, said Mrs. Fue.

"Kids aren't getting that guidance at home these days because parents are up to here with work and responsibilities and everything," she said.

Even in the best of times, with the best of family situations, a teacher's job extended beyond the three R's into helping students become better people and better citizens, the teachers of the year said. At a time when children bring the results of shattered families, drugs and even violence into the school, teachers should not, and indeed cannot, assume a value-neutral stance, they said.

"I can't even imagine what that classroom would look like," said Suzanne Mears, the 1994 state teacher of the year from Fredericksburg, Va. "I certainly don't come in with a curriculum or an agenda, ever. But these issues come up constantly. And if you're not willing to deal with these issues in some way, you have no business being in the classroom." 'The Biggest Thing We Can Do for Kids'

By the end of a school year, Mrs. Fue has helped her children understand decency, honesty, fairness. But if she believes in one great trait that every 10-year-old should possess, it is responsibility.

"The biggest thing we can do for kids is to teach them to be responsible for themselves because nobody else is going to be responsible for them," she said. "I tell my students, 'You are perfectly free not to do something. But you have to accept the consequences.' "

Every day, Mrs. Fue lists assignments on a big white board in her classroom. Every day, students are expected to copy them down and take them home. Mrs. Fue is a fanatic for parental signatures -- tests, homework, reading lists, everything goes home to be signed. Partly, it is her way of insuring that parents know what their child does in school. But she also hopes to teach students that everyone has obligations to fulfill.

An unsigned paper means a mark in Mrs. Fue's book. Three marks in a month means a trip to the principal's office and a lost day of recess. Three trips to the principal in one marking period means detention. But every new month means a new chance.

Some days, Mrs. Fue does not even check signatures, just cruises the aisles asking students if they did what they were supposed to do. On Tuesday, 9-year-old Sarah Mutter mumbles "No," but Mrs. Fue hears "Yes."

After Mrs. Fue moves on, 10-year-old Richard Scheule leans across the aisle and whispers furiously to Sarah. "She didn't hear you," he says. "You're going to get in trouble."

"I told her," Sarah whispers back. "I told her."

"She didn't hear you. You better go tell her."

Sarah gets up, walks over to Mrs. Fue and corrects the error. Mrs. Fue makes the change and sends Sarah back to her seat.

Later, Sarah explains that she told Mrs. Fue the truth because "I'm a truthful person. I like to tell the truth."

Mrs. Fue said she has made it clear to her class where she stands on dishonesty.

"I say to them, 'I trust everything you tell me until you lie to me. Then I don't believe anything,' " she said. "If you can't be trusted for your word, something's wrong."

On Wednesday the class comes jovially back from the library, but three boys have not checked out books.

"How are you going to read without a book?" Mrs. Fue asks and writes their names on the assignment board to remind them to go back to the library during recess.

Mrs. Fue is big on reading. Her students are supposed to read 20 minutes a night. The whole school is also involved in a contest in which every child is supposed to read 100 minutes a week for six weeks.

It used to be that classes in which every child met the goal won an ice cream party from a local dairy. But parents complained that it was unfair to allow one child to ruin everyone's fun: unfair to the child as well as the class. So now each child gets an individual reward.

"There are times when you do things because it makes it better for everybody else," she said.

So to drive home the idea of the common good, Mrs. Fue has promised her class a surprise if all students meet the reading goal. They do not know what the surprise is, which makes them all the more eager.

"This is what families used to do -- they gave the understanding that what I do affects other people," she said. "I try to replace that here."

Often the best way to teach values is to exhibit them, several teachers said. During a geography lesson, Mrs. Fue has to borrow a student's map to illustrate a point. Both times she asks before she takes it; both times she thanks him when she is done.

Linda Bates, New Mexico's 1994 teacher of the year, keeps a "turkey jar" in her classroom in Roswell, N.M. Anyone who makes a sarcastic remark or in any way demeans another person must drop money in the jar "for acting like a turkey." Ms. Bates occasionally makes a contribution herself.

"It's unrealistic to expect students to be better than their role models," she said. "I read somewhere that values are caught as well as taught."

None of the 20 teachers of the year opposed having a moment of silence in school. And though the vast majority opposed school prayer, a few thought it would be helpful. Mrs. Bates said she approves of school prayer, as long as it is student-directed and student-led. Ms. Talbott, a science teacher, said prayer has a powerful effect in her school, which through a unique arrangement functions as a Catholic school part of the time and a public school during the rest.

"We have few discipline problems," she said. "There is a lot of respect in our school, because we do start the day focusing on values.

But these teachers emphasized that they worked at keeping their own politics, and their own religious values, out of the classroom. Robert Van Camp, Michigan's 1994 teacher of the year who described himself as an old-fashioned liberal, said he never tells his students how he votes, although they often ask.

"I don't want them to model me, or to close the door," he said. "I try to probe their positions, to get them thinking and interested. I'm much more interested in that."

In the end, even the best teacher is going to have serious problems if the groundwork has not been laid by the parents, Mrs. Fue said. And like parents, teachers rarely know whether the seeds they have planted will take hold. Occasionally, Mrs. Fue said, a former student appears in her doorway to thank her, two feet taller and wiser about the world.

"People look at the world and say, 'It's so messed up I can't do anything,' " she said. "So they do nothing. I always try to find at least one kid and find a little spark and get them turned around."

Photo: "The biggest thing we can do for kids is to teach them to be responsible for themselves," says Nina Fue, the 1990 teacher of the year in New Jersey. Mrs. Fue recently worked on a lesson with some of her fourth graders. (Laura Pedrick for The New York Times) (pg. B7)